The short answer? Because we can 😛
The long answer? Because it’s important.
“Don’t put your politics in my games!”
I get what you’re saying, I really do… But what if – and hear me out – maybe politics and games can coexist?
No matter how hard a creator tries to avoid it, every piece of art or media is inherently political: it was made by an individual who inhabits a political system. Whether we want them to or not, these influences seep into everything we do, say, create, or consume – video games included. While Silicon Dreams might not be a “political game” our goal is to present the player with an interesting, personal, and emotional experience. The political aspects of the game world serve as the backdrop and framing device for the lives of the androids and people you will encounter through the course of your work.
In Jamie’s previous post, he touched on a part of what we think makes Silicon Dreams such an exciting project. To briefly summarize: Spinnortality is a cyberpunk dystopia on a macro-scale. The player enacts wide-reaching political change, overthrows governments, that sort of thing.
In Silicon Dreams the scope is much tighter. The focus is on people, individuals; having the opportunity to peer into their lives, forming an understanding of how this dystopia affects them on a personal level, and the giving the player the responsibility of ultimately deciding their fate.
Okay, so what’s so political about that?
Cyberpunk and Politics
Cyberpunk has always been a deeply political genre. Its core tenet is, after all, the juxtaposition of highly advanced technology with societal stagnation, and often a huge gap between rich and poor. In a setting such as this, how can one not question the issues surrounding capitalism, exploitative corporations, class divides, and socio-economic turmoil? Like I said, cyberpunk is deeply political.
We can already catch glimpses of this dystopia in our own present. Have you ever used your smartphone as an excuse to ignore a homeless person in the street, or seen an online ad selected by an algorithm to appeal to your political ideology, trying to sway you on some issue or other? To me, that’s a deeply cyberpunk experience, straight from our own reality! Cyberpunk: for all its neon and holograms, its focus on social upheaval and fancy tech is a priceless vehicle for us to address issues in the real world through the filter of a fictional future.
Jamie and I came to this conclusion during one of our development meetings where we discussed, among other things, politics, mental health, and the current state of the world. Personally, I’ve had to severely limit my intake of news media because I’m simply overcome by the discrepancy between the problems I see and my perceived inability to effect any sort of tangible change. I think this might be true for a lot of people to varying degrees.
Wrestling with the politics, problems, and shortcomings of this reality is not an easy thing to do. If, however, those same problems are framed in a fictional setting, players can engage with its content as their comfort and mental state allow. This is the difference between shying away from the news (filled with economic and political turmoil), and being able to say “Let’s play BioShock and talk about Ayn Rand and objectivism! Let’s play Papers, Please and talk about authoritarian regimes and the cost of sacrificing freedom for security!” Topics that are not easily approachable in the real world can suddenly become accessible when those topics are framed in fiction.
What to expect from Silicon Dreams
We want to cover a lot of ground with this game while keeping it an engaging and snappy experience for the player. This is very much a peek behind the curtain, and all of this is still a work in progress; we wanted to share some of our ideas, although no final decisions have been made.
In Silicon Dreams the player has one-on-one conversations with a series of androids, learning about their lives in the process. This naturally brings up questions about whether or not these androids are “people”, but it also gives the player a privileged insight into their lives.
Of course, the player isn’t the only character who has to make this choice. The fictional public inhabiting the world of Silicon Dreams also have thoughts on the issue. Through these characters we could bring in any number of difficult topics: emotional and physical abuse, gaslighting, or the treatment of oppressed groups. We don’t take any of these topics lightly, and we know that they may be difficult for some players. For particularly fraught interactions, we plan to include a way to skip scenes with no negative effect on the game: like we were saying above, we want to make these issues approachable through fiction, not force players to grapple with tough topics.
In this fictional space, we want to highlight things happening in the real world as amplified by the themes and political stance of cyberpunk. What kinds of stories can we tell through this “android interrogation” framing device?
We have to consider low-wage workers, unable to earn a living because companies know they’ll be forced to take any job they can get – regardless of whether or not pay’s fair or the work is safe. Protesters, whistle-blowers, and union leaders get scapegoated by a powerful corporation, trying to protect their profits rather than the people who make those profits possible. People who require life-changing (even life-saving) medical procedures but are unable to obtain them because healthcare has evolved into a for-profit industry.
And what about the obvious parallel between the dehumanization of an artificial consciousness and the shameful history of slavery? In both cases, the key question is “Is this a person?”. How black people were thought to literally be a “lower form of life”, and not have souls – how they were considered animate but not truly “human”. I’m shocked by how this question of “is this person in front of me actually a human or not?” is not a question that began with sci-fi books about robots. There are much older echoes of certain demographics being denied the status of “fully ensouled human”: early Church fathers compared pagans to monkeys, and for centuries white scholars compared black people, especially black slaves, to apes. White doctors in the 1850s even claimed that slaves who fled their plantations were suffering from a mental illness which caused them to flee their masters: “Drapetomania”. If a person you own, who should (you believe) be submissive, acts according to their own free will, that is not proof they are actually a human being: they’re just broken. This has obvious parallels to Silicon Dreams, where an android expressing unhappiness with their owner is simply exhibiting a glitch that needs to be fixed.
As we said at the very start, these are important topics with far-reaching implications for society and each individual’s quality of life. We don’t intend to address these with university-lecture levels of detail in Silicon Dreams, but we do believe they’re important context that the two of us should expose ourselves to, and we do want to tackle some of these dynamics – albeit through the analogy of androids – in the final game. If we ever hope to solve these problems, we have to be willing to ask hard questions, and games can help us get there even if they approach it from a different direction.
Not at the table!
Politics have a bad rap for being a divisive topic of conversation. One item on a list of things that are better avoided when around the holiday dinner table. Our goal is to foster a different kind of political discourse, hopefully one characterized by statements like “That’s not what I believe, but thanks for sharing your experience and giving me something to think about.”
So what do you think? Are you excited to see certain topics covered in the game? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!